


Stranded

by Aithilin



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Cute, Gen, prompt fills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-21 00:52:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12445776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aithilin/pseuds/Aithilin
Summary: Nyx thought that he knew the waters near the Old Lucis ruins well.





	Stranded

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted over at my [Tumblr](http://aithilin.tumblr.com/).

Nyx had been shipwrecked before. He had travelled the churning, unpredictable waters of the Old Lucis Gulf for years, following the pull of the tide as it tried (and has once or twice successfully managed) to pull him too close to the stone ruins that lined the misshapen coast. He had watched helplessly as the strange ruins shattered his boat as struggled against the waves, managing by some miracle or another to get away from the eddies and currents and on to the scraping, cutting outcrops. 

Days later he would make it up the cursed cliffsides and shelter in the ruins of the old outposts until he could find another human— hunter or civilian— to direct him back home.

But he had never been wrecked so far from the coast. 

He had always heard there was a city beneath the Lucis sea. Some fairytale told to the new sailors and the children who liked those sorts of flights of fancy. It was always said that Old Lucis was lost, like Solheim, for its sins— claimed by one of the wrathful Astrals for their arrogance with their powers. 

Nyx had never actually expected to see it. Or at least the skeletal structures of towers tall enough to be barely hidden by the cold, churning, white-tipped waves. He never expected to see the steel structures and the lost city that had been dragged into the depths for himself. 

He would have marvelled if he hadn’t been preoccupied with drowning. 

Nyx had never been wrecked so far from the coast before. His shelter just a small outcrop of stone in the sheer cliffs, the tides lapping at the little ledge he had woken up on. He could see the crumble of the ancient walls in the distance— too far to tell where he was, from the outposts he had become familiar with. His nets and water had washed up with him, but the cliff was as smooth as the ancient fortifications built by the ancient Lucians. There weren’t even any weather-worn cracks to use to climb. 

It took a day to notice that he wasn’t alone where he was stranded. A day of realising that the full force of the sun wouldn’t reach him, and that the cold of the night was blocked. It was at dawn, when he dipped his salvaged net into the water that he saw the tail. 

Black as a shining night beneath the grey waves, Nyx saw the pallid flesh more than the splash of the tail. 

It was another day before he recovered enough to try to catch the creature. 

The stories of the ancient Lucians went that they were taken by the Astrals— turned into the creatures that haunted the coasts and ruins of the old kingdom. That they grew wings or fish tails, fangs and claws, and still roamed the kingdom as daemons.

“Wait!” 

The creature that kept visiting him did not seem like a daemon. For one, it had blue eyes. Blue eyes and quick smile. 

“Don’t leave, please!”

Nyx was not accustomed to begging for anything. But he was hungry, and scared, and he needed to get home. At the very least, he needed to determine if the creature now pulling itself up to the outcrop was real. It certainly felt real enough— soft hair and solid features, an amused quirk of its lips and the flash of fang as it laughed and pushed him away from his curious examination. 

“What are you?”

“I’m Noctis.”

“And that is…?”

“My name.”

“Right…” The creature moved easily, the delicate frills of its tail clinging to the smooth scales rather than the stone. And Nyx was transfixed; “I’m—”

“Nyx Ulric. Yes, I know.”

“How?”

“Because you’re mine.”

“Yours…” Nyx took a deep breath and attempted to will his mind to catch up to the whole situation— to the whole absurdity of it. “Okay. Explain.”

The story was actually very simple. There was a magic to the old Lucian blood. There was a promise kept between allied clans and old bloodlines— like the rulers of Lucis and the Ulric clan of Galahd. A king needed a Shield and a Blade to protect the kingdom, and his father had disappeared in the Gulf for the same siren song that had called him back to the same waves countless times. 

Only when Noctis explained it, he was grinning. Fanged and smug and looking far more like a cat than a daemon. 

“No.” Nyx finally responded once the story was done. Once the fairytale was set out between them.

“What?”

“I need to go home.”

“You are—”

“If you say that I am home, I’m going to skewer you and see if you’re edible.”

“That’s hardly the polite way to reject your calling,” came a second voice— prim and proper and from another strange creature that had just surface. “I’m sure there are ways to decline that aren’t so… gruesome.”

Another creature, larger, rougher, pulled himself up to the stones to look Nyx over; “I told you all it wouldn’t work. Humans have their priorities skewed.”

“I don’t know about that,” the third voice was younger, and Nyx had to peer over the edge of the stone to see the smiling, freckled creature before it slipped into the waves. 

There was really only one reaction Nyx could think of having. Surrounded by the fairytale creatures he had never thought existed, and exhausted, he buried his face in his hands; “You know what? Fine. Take me home, and I’ll talk about it there. Got it?”

When he looked up, Noctis was beaming. “Got it.”


End file.
